Coastal Magic Convention – Pt. 1

Hey, all! Taking a page out of Deborah Blake’s book—because she writes really awesome books—I’m going to do the write-up of the Coastal Magic Convention in two posts, because there’s just too much awesome to fit into a single one.

First, for those who don’t know, Coastal Magic is a convention that happens every year the first weekend in February out in Daytona Beach, FL (except for the very first year when it was Olde City, New Blood and took place in St. Augustine). It was special right from the start, an intimate, casual convention of authors and readers in a beautiful beach setting.

Last year I threw my back out right before the convention then made the mistake of driving out anyway, exacerbating everything and ending up in the emergency room.  Good times! This year was even sweeter for knowing what I had missed (my con family) and knowing that Jennifer Morris, who puts this con together with love, sweat and, I don’t doubt, a few tears, had saved my spot. Thank you, Jennifer—for everything!

Deborah Blake was my roommate for Coastal Magic both this year and last (lucky her!), and I couldn’t have asked for better. We started out the con with a great lunch at Bubba Gump with a great group of people (L to R: me, Gail Z. Martin, Nancy Northcott, Eric Asher, Deborah Blake and Alethea Kontis).

We moved into a wonderful meet and mingle that evening, complete with unicorn hunt, courtesy of the wonderful T.C. Blue. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen grown adults bolting across the entire length of a ballroom to swipe a stuffed unicorn out of a light fixture before anyone gets to it. When my story is told—and it will be, probably for generations to come—please note that no actual attendees were clotheslined in the pursuit of my unicorn. Really, I swear.

To cap off the evening, we had Damon Suede’s famous Cinema Craptastique, in which he takes a horrible, terrible, no good, very bad film and makes it…well, palatable might be going too far, especially in this case. How about much more amusing than it otherwise has any right to be. This year’s choice was GLITTER, staring Mariah Carey. All I can say is that this is not to be watched without alcohol and someone like Damon to Mystery Science Theatre it. You have been warned. It is truly, horrifyingly, disjointedly bad—short scenes with as little dialogue as possible interspersed with slow-motion montages interspersed with more short scenes, many including the same two songs which seem to have been the only ones chosen for the film. I’ll give you one thing, Mariah Carey has a helluva voice, always has, but her acting… Well, I’ll just leave that right there. Anyway, Damon really gets into his work, and sometimes out of his clothes for the occasion, as you can see!